Reminds me of boxed software, too. You check the compatibility, the features that included one must-have new feature. Buy it and discover what vaporware is. It started me on the ethics of pirating, finding out if it actually works, and then, and only then, buying a real copy. I donate to developers on Linux, now.
I mean, it really only started to take off with eDonkey. napster was still very slow and so much malware disguised as mp3 files.
You didn’t even have to think about storage solutions. Even if i had my ISDN Connection bundled ( no phone line free for calls then ), the speed was max 128 Kbps.
Sorry, i suddenly remembered these details, from a long long time ago.
50% were laid off. This after Songtradr had commited to keep the Bandcamp experience the same.
The union was for nothing. Epic just sold, before any agreement wss made and again a few made a lot, while employees must endure whatever comes.
This fucking sucks big time.
The Internet as we knew it, is fading away and we just can hope that our privacy and an open internet are not only things we remember fondly, in a few years.
I just got to college in 2000 and had highspeed Napster. From there I found some sketch Russian site I could get music from for a few years in the early 2000s but there was also a huge used CD store in my college town with reasonable prices I used to frequent. Now days if I want to find a bunch of new music I dont know, Usenet for the win. But honestly most of the stuff I like is on bandcamp usually and I will go buy the bands I find on use net. My best discovery has been Brant Bjork (he played drums in Kyuss but makes chill ass rock) and PallBearer and Arkansas doom band that is pretty great. I have since purchased their catalogue on Vinyl, mostly on band camp because it is hard to find in stores.
In the 2000s i was always looking for music and found a Forum from Ukraine called FunkySouls that covered all new releases and was active until a few days after Russia invaded. There were some threads with excellent taste and i really miss those guys.
After i found that Moon Wiring Club was on Bandcamp, i took a look around and found a lot of good music. When i buy something, it’s usually from Bandcamp.
I saw Kyuss live a loong time ago, thanks for the tip. This made me think of Boris’ new EP “me when the when i”. They were always a tad too experimental for me to keep them on repeat. Their newest album though, is a very very smooth release - chill ass rock describes it perfectly.
I also stumbled on the label subsist on Bandcamp some time ago and have gotten almost all releases and eagerly waiting for new releases. Excellent raw electronics.
Oh, they weren’t mp3 files. Iirc it was stuff like darude-sandstorm-live-mp3.exe or eminem-without-me-mp3.exe.
It wasn’t Napster’s fault, ISDN at the time was what most people had. 1 internet + 1 phone line. You got online with max 68 Kbps. Bundling both lines got you 128 Kbps, then the phone line would be obviously busy giving you more speed, rendering the phone unusable.
Those were fun times in households with more than 1 member.
The music shop at the mall near me had those headphones but only like 10 albums that were able to demo. And I’m pretty sure the demo was just bits of the songs. I definitely bought plenty of CDs having heard only one track or fewer.
Oh, that sucks. Mine had like some headphones at the counter with a few buttons in the counter itself. And you would just hand the person behind the counter the cd you wanted to listen to and they’d put it in.
But from what I saw on old footage was they just had a line of a few turntables with headphones and you could just listen to the records.
This may have been the mom and pop shops and not the chain shops. Though I don’t know about that.
Alternate take - spend 3 minutes downloading a 3 minute song. Buy the album. The rest of the album blows. You just worked for two hours to pay for it in your minimum wage after school casual job
in 1999 you had the ability to get into a music shop, load the cd and test listen to it. Or just go through the music charts. Or wish for a specific song on radio.
Also 1999 already had Napster, Morpheus and others.
I think there’s also an element of the hit tracks often being a bit more formulaic. There’s a big component of familiarity in music that makes it appealing, so people might not appreciate the more experimental tracks on an album until they’ve heard them a few times.
Nope, not every place had the money to burn on a cd in a jukebox from every artist. Also standing there for 45 minutes to listen to the entire thing? Who actually does that?
Also standing there for 45 minutes to listen to the entire thing? Who actually does that?
Me. It was me. I was 14. I listened to the whole thing. I think the name of the store was “The Warehouse” and maybe another was called “Good Guys”? But yeah. Both. I’d take the bus to the mall and sit on that raggedy ass carpet that smelled like a movie theater floor and listened to the whole damn album. All of them actually (usually like 6-8 per station?) until the manager told me to leave. A couple times clerks would hook me up with burned demos.
God, I miss test listens. My favorite record store was very easy going in this, they’d happily let me stand there listening to most of the CD. The unspoken rule was that if you spend that much time listening, you’re going to buy it anyway.
One of the few shops where I always felt welcome.
In the 2000s, some electronics stores where I lived had “jukeboxes” with headphones and a barcode scanner, so you could listen to 30-second snippets of the songs on an album before buying it.
I still keep a pencil in my car. I know there’s no cassette to play, but my car feels naked with a pencil rolling around the center console or in the little tray on the dash.
It was less that we were poor and more that my parents had a lot of music and radio dramas on different media. My father still has more than two hundred vinyl disks that he plays semiregularly and I have an old audio tape player/recorder sitting around in my bedroom although I don’t really use that one.
In the pre-Internet early 90s, CDs were $15-25 (with inflation, about $40 now)…. And for a lot of music, you had no way of hearing it first. Shoplifting was popular.
1999 piracy mostly consisted of paying for a pirated copy that someone decided to make profit off; most likely, they weren’t the person to make the (first!) copy, and they’re not even sure what’s on the thing they were selling you. It was mostly bootlegging.
When I was a kid we still recorded stuff off the radio and copied our zx spectrum games on the family hi-fi. I’d say good times but it’s so much better now I can pirate everything in great quality from teh interwebs.
My memory is a little fuzzy with dates but I’m pretty sure Napster was going full steam by '99 but even before that we used to trade mp3 files on mIRC or ICQ+CuteFTP, I had hundreds of albums I never paid for which I am still amazed I managed to do over a shared 56k connection
So much this! I don’t use Spotify, I buy all my music on Bandcamp. Sometimes I buy an album after just hearing the first song because I find it interesting, but then after a few more listens I realize that the album is not what I thought it was. However, I’m already committed because I paid for it, and it now sits at the top of my collection, so I continue to listen to it. Sometimes it turns out I find qualities in the music that I didn’t notice at the first listen, and I learn to like it. Sometimes not, and I ditch it.
This was also the way I discovered music before Spotify even existed, I just never changed my habits (I just used other services than Bandcamp back then). I think more people should try turning off the algorithmic entertainment faucet that is Spotify and try committing a bit more to the music that they listen to. Also, a lot more money goes to the artists this way, Spotify is basically stealing from the artists.
I have 170 albums in my Bandcamp collection. I have a lot more on my mp3 collection which I have bought via other means. Each album is maybe $10 on average, so that is around $1700. I have used Bandcamp for around 8 years after 7digital closed their EU store and eMusic became trash. So that’s around $17 per month. Not a lot of money in my book, music means a lot to me!
My best guess is that it originally was “fucking,” someone censored it to something like “hecking,” then someone else censored the censor back to “fucking”
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